Nothing to see here, just some Nazi salutes at today’s football match in Rivne, Ukraine - video by Azov sergeant Dmytro Usychenko, who fought in Mariupol and returned from Russian captivity in 2022

https://x.com/mossrobeson__/status/1951711158463054191

In a blatant escalation of the U.S. government’s anti-immigrant agenda, ICE launches a recruitment campaign offering $50,000 bonuses and student loan forgiveness to “patriots” who join its enforcement ranks. This policy deepens repression against migrants under Trump’s regime and reflects imperialism’s ongoing assault on human rights.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency recently unveiled a recruitment drive aimed at expanding its ranks with aggressive incentives, including signing bonuses up to $50,000 and partial student loan forgiveness of up to $60,000.

This campaign, framed around the slogan “Defend the Homeland,” calls for Americans to become “patriots” to rid the country of alleged “criminals and predators”, a thinly veiled code for migrants. These offers seek to boost ICE’s capacity to execute mass deportations and deepen the regime’s crackdown on migrant communities, fueling hatred and state violence.

According to ICE’s official messaging, recruits can choose roles as deportation officers, criminal investigators, or prosecutors under an orchestrated “mission” framework. These lucrative bonuses and employment benefits, ranging from health insurance to telework options, are part of a broader strategy to militarize migration enforcement by incentivizing participation in what progressives denounce as a racist, xenophobic apparatus.

Human rights organizations and migrant advocacy groups warn that these measures entrench policies responsible for thousands of family separations, detentions, and violations of basic human dignity across the U.S. and its border regions.

The recruitment campaign embodies the neoliberal, imperialist project embodied by the Trump administration. It transforms state violence into a lucrative career, where “patriotism” is weaponized against vulnerable populations fleeing poverty and violence, conditions largely driven by U.S.-backed neoliberal policies across the Americas.

The rhetoric of “defending the homeland” serves as ideological cover for the extension of settler-colonial systems and racial capitalism, scapegoating migrants while consolidating authoritarian controls over marginalized communities.

This campaign not only threatens the safety and dignity of migrants but also undermines social cohesion and fuels racist divisions within the population. Instead of promoting justice or addressing root causes of migration, the U.S. government doubles down on militarization and repression.

The international left and global human rights movements must urgently condemn these policies as they continue to dehumanize millions and perpetuate cycles of displacement, dispossession, and state terror.

A flight from the U.S. arrived in Cuba carrying 118 irregular Cuban migrants repatriated according to bilateral migration agreements between the two countries.

On August 1, 2025, a flight from the United States landed at Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport carrying 118 Cuban migrants repatriated by U.S. authorities under existing bilateral agreements. According to Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior (Minint), this is the seventh repatriation operation carried out from U.S. territory so far this year.

Minint reported that, in total, 27 repatriation flights have been conducted in 2025 from various countries in the region, with 833 individuals returned. Of the 118 migrants on this flight, 96 were men and 22 were women. Additionally, three individuals were transferred to investigative authorities upon arrival due to alleged prior criminal activities.

Since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second presidency in early 2025, deportations have remained a prioritized policy of the U.S. administration. In the first month of 2025 alone, approximately 37,660 people were deported nationwide, maintaining a high level of removals compared to previous years.

Cuban migrants have been a significant group in these operations, with at least seven repatriation flights returning over 800 Cubans from U.S. territory this year. These figures reflect ongoing enforcement efforts consistent with Trump-era immigration policies focusing on increased deportations.

The Cuban government reaffirmed its commitment to the bilateral migration agreements and emphasized the importance of regular, safe, and orderly migration. Authorities continue to coordinate with their U.S. counterparts to carry out these returns in accordance with the agreed terms.

These deportation policies and the recent repatriation of Cuban migrants reflect a broader political intention of the current U.S. administration to adopt a strict anti-immigration stance.

Since President Trump resumed office in 2025, the government has expanded restrictive measures including immigration bans targeting countries such as Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela, justified under national security claims.

A return flight to Cuba was carried out with 118 irregular migrants from the U.S. (96 men and 22 women). There have been a total of 27 deportations from various countries in the region in 2025, with a total of 833 people returned.

Deportations have remained at historically high levels, with tens of thousands removed monthly, including hundreds of Cuban migrants returned under bilateral agreements. This approach signals not only an enforcement of border control but also a deliberate political effort to restrict migration flows, limit legal migration pathways, and criminalize irregular migrants.

The policies contribute to heightened insecurity for migrants and interrupt their pursuit of asylum or safety, illustrating a sustained administration agenda focused on deterrence and exclusion rather than comprehensive migration solutions.

Amid the ongoing Zionist genocide against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, as the siege, starvation, and daily massacres intensify, the dimensions of international and regional complicity are being exposed with increasing brazenness and openness. At the heart of this complicity, both the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the French Republic are playing a suspicious role, attempting to reimpose what is called the “two-state solution” as a political exit, precisely at a time when people are being annihilated, the land is being burned, and homes are being demolished on top of their inhabitants.

What Paris and Riyadh are promoting is nothing short of an open political genocide, recycling of a failed and dangerous project, one that seeks to liquidate the Palestinian cause under the guise of so-called “international legitimacy.” And yet, what is being proposed occurs entirely outside the framework of all UN resolutions related to the Palestinian question, flawed as those resolutions may be. It is a continuation of what was started by Camp David, Oslo, Wadi Araba, and the Abraham Accords — the systematic violation of Palestinian rights and the fragmentation of the goals of the Palestinian national struggle.

How is it possible to speak of “two states” in the context of comprehensive occupation from the river to the sea, of accelerating colonial settlement in the West Bank, and of collective massacres being committed against children, women, and men in Gaza? How can a people who have resisted for over seven decades be offered a state on paper, without sovereignty, without an army, without the right of return? And why is a people fighting on behalf of the entire Arab nation being asked to surrender all of its rights?

France has always been a principal partner in the Western colonial and imperialist project in our region. Today, it continues this filthy role through its full support for the Zionist entity, its refusal to halt arms exports, and its brutal repression of any public expression of support for Palestine on its own soil. Paris falsely and brazenly presents itself as an “honest broker,” while it stands firmly in the same trench as Washington and Tel Aviv, hosting conferences that seek to entrench the system of occupation. Indeed, it has managed to dilute the positions of several European countries, including Ireland, Norway, Belgium, and Spain.

As for the repressive, obscurantist Saudi regime, after years of ideological, religious, and political preparation, it no longer even pretends to be ashamed of its strategic partnership with the Zionist entity. It openly presents full normalization as a “rational” path that the rest of the Arab states should follow. For the rulers of Riyadh, Palestine is nothing more than a bargaining chip to improve the terms of U.S. protection. They are not embarrassed by their open conspiracy against the resistance or by their pressure to disarm it and strip it of legitimacy, even if the price is the extermination of two million people in Gaza. This comes as no surprise: this is the same bloody regime that led a criminal war against the people of Yemen.

The essence of the so-called “two-state solution” is nothing but the legitimation of the Zionist entity, the enshrinement of defeat, and the consolidation of a racist colonial entity on 90% of the land of Palestine — not just the 78% commonly cited. In return, it proposes a weak, fragmented, and functional Palestinian entity confined to the few remaining besieged islands in the West Bank and Gaza, whose presence will not exceed more than 10% of the land, without any guarantees for the right of return, the dismantling of settlements, or the release of prisoners. This is not a project for a just solution; it is a liquidation project. It seeks to strip the Palestinian people of the essence of their cause: liberation and return.

The New York Declaration: Total Capitulation and a State on Paper

In this context, the danger of the so-called “New York Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of the Palestinian Question,” issued recently, becomes apparent. It states: “We welcomed the commitments made by Mahmoud Abbas on behalf of Palestine, contained in his letter dated 9 June 2025, including the pursuit of a peaceful settlement to the Palestinian issue and the continued rejection of violence and terrorism.” The statement continues: “We also welcomed his affirmation that the Palestinian state should be the sole authority responsible for providing security in its territory, but it does not intend to be an armed state.”

This formulation does not merely mark an attempted official declaration of the end of the Palestinian national project and total surrender to the conditions of occupation and Zionism. It also represents the death of the so-called “Palestinian state,” even by the standards of the “Authority” itself, which has tried to market this idea among our people. A “state” without land, without arms, without resistance, without decision-making power, without sovereignty, one that accepts Western and Saudi guardianship, is nothing more than a security appendage of the Zionist system. It has nothing to do with the aspirations of our people for liberation and sovereignty. It is even more grotesque than the infamous limited “self-rule” project.

The bitter irony in this repulsive scene is that the Zionist enemy itself does not even accept this content-less program, as it refuses even “Mahmoud Abbas’s vision” and the Oslo liquidation agreements, despite the fact that these were originally crafted to protect it, consolidate its occupation, and constrain our people’s resistance. So perhaps we can take some comfort in the fact that the Zionist war criminals and their backers are working to sabotage this project! In the presence of impotent and complicit Palestinian leaderships and Arab regimes, Zionist colonialism leans on them to carry out the liquidation of the Palestinian cause.

This dangerous phase demands absolute and uncompromising Palestinian, Arab and international popular rejection of this treacherous liquidation project. It requires us to seize back the initiative from the hands of these puppet regimes, and to escalate the popular, political, financial, and military support for the Palestinian resistance by all means necessary. The experience of the past decades has proven that the Zionist enemy understands only the language of force, and that rights are not restored through negotiations and false mediations, but through armed struggle and comprehensive resistance.

All of occupied Palestine, from the river to the sea, is the sacred right of the Palestinian people, and it is non-negotiable. The right of return for refugees is inalienable, not subject to delay or bargaining. Anyone who promotes the fragmentation or diminishment of these rights is part of the liquidation project, whether they cloak themselves in religion or raise the banner of secularism and democracy. No perfume from Paris or Riyadh will mask the stench of their treacherous project.

Existing laws shielding biodiversity, drinking water, and public accountability will be voided to accelerate the regime’s aggressive military expansion. Poulsen, ranked by observers as the regime’s second or third most powerful figure, will gain unilateral power to approve projects such as American bases, private arms factories, and rare-earth processing plants. Municipalities, environmental statutes, and public objections will be bypassed. Poulsen will hold “the authority to make decisions, issue permits and dispensations, etc., issue orders and prohibitions, and impose administrative fines.” Independent oversight is absent and those impacted by his decrees will have no legal recourse.

Critics across Danish civil society, including the national association of water utilities, the Danish Bar Association and environmental NGOs, have sounded the alarm in their replies to the formal public consultation process for the bill. “There is no requirement that the military or a private defence company must present documentation that the project they want to carry out will be built and operated in the least damaging location and with the least damaging solutions,” says Anders Juel of the Danish Society for Nature Conservation.

Ammunition plants and rare-earth facilities, industries infamous for heavy metal contamination and toxic waste, could be placed directly on protected wetlands. There is no obligation to investigate alternatives. “If the relationship with Russia improves, we can roll back the military buildup. But the damage to nature caused by military installations and private defence companies cannot be rolled back,” Juel warns. “It can take a hundred years for nature to be re-established – if it comes back at all.” He adds that Denmark is facing a biodiversity crisis and states that allowing the destruction of nature is a step in the wrong direction.

DANVA (the Danish Water and Wastewater Association) as well as the organisation Danish Waterworks are warning against putting military considerations above the safety rules set in place to keep drinking water clean and secure the long-term protection of groundwater resources.

If water mains, sewers or heating pipes are in the way of new military construction, local utilities will be ordered to move them. This is a very costly operation but the new bill allows the regime to bypass existing cost-sharing legislation and decide the matter by decree, potentially leaving local utility companies, and ultimately local residents, to foot the bill. “We are concerned that it will be local citizens in the towns where the military installations are to be built who will bear the financial and environmental burden because military installations are being built hastily,” warns Karsten Bjørno of the DANVA. He is backed up by the organisation of Danish district heating utilities who writes in their reply that “it is unfair that citizens who are customers in local utility companies have to pay for government projects over their heating bill.”

Perhaps the bill’s most brazen feature is its elimination of the right for local residents and environmental NGO’s to legally challenge military construction projects. The reason given by the Liberal Party-controlled Defence Ministry is that allowing complaints would ”potentially involve significant and real risks and uncertainties for the completion and progress" of military projects. Denmark’s legal establishment is recoiling. The Danish Bar Association is warning that abolishing the complaint process weakens openness, transparency and the rule of law, violating what was previously considered fundamental principles of the Danish legal system. The independent legal think tank Justitia warn that the law would hand over decision making to “a closed circuit, where it effectively becomes the government itself that assesses when ordinary legal safeguards can be disregarded… central legal safeguards and rule of law principles are being limited.”

Municipalities housing military sites share these fears. Fredericia Municipality bluntly states: “This law short-circuits local democracy and citizen influence.”

Despite the outcry, the bill is expected to sail through the Nordic hermit kingdom’s rubber-stamp parliament, as it is firmly controlled by the regime and its loyalists.

The bill is merely a local symptom of a broader, unmistakable trend across the NATO bloc where democratic institutions are being hollowed out, retooled for war, and turned inward against their own populations. Since the defeat of the Soviet Union relieved Western elites of the need to compete ideologically with communism, the incentives to maintain the appearances of functioning democracies have eroded. The result is plain: in times of imperial decline, climate crisis, and domestic unrest, the public sphere is flooded with nationalism and paranoia, the military swells, and legal rights are repackaged as threats to national security.

In such a climate, clean drinking water, functioning democracy and the well-being of the civilian population is reduced to mere obstacles. And the citizens themselves, so troublesome and querulous, are best left outside the room.

Source: Forsvarsministeren vil sætte miljølove og klageret ud af kraft for at bygge militære anlæg og våbenfabrikker, Arbejderen, August 1st 2025